Casting His Eerie Glow Upon the Masses

Review – D&D Tiny Adventures, a Facebook app

I’m generally pretty sour on Facebook applications. They seem to resort to extortion tactics, presumably to pump the number of installations.

Send Good Karma is a good example of this. In the beginning, one could only get limited edition karmas by requesting them from people who had them. They were rare, and had some intrinsic value. Now you have to buy them with jPoints (acquired by visiting the site and sucking in friends), and receiving them doesn’t mean you can bestow them upon others.

D&D Tiny Adventures hasn’t fallen into that trap. You select an archetype and away you go. You are led through a series of encounters, and through some simulated die rolling, fare better or worse along the way. It reminds me of play by email, albeit without much user input.

But, for a Facebook application, that’s tolerable. I’m satisfied to check back the 10 minutes between encounters to see how my character is doing. It’s a low-effort, fair-reward model with a high enough rate of return that keeps me coming back for more. I won’t remain sated for long, so I hope enhancements are in the works. I would like to see some opportunities to make choices in future versions, for example.